Ok now here's what's going on. After three years of happy gaming with my GTX570HD I started getting BSODs/ lockups after a few minutes of gaming. It was like this... one day everything was 100% and I played about 3 hours non stop TF2. The next day crashes within minutes. A quick trip to the event viewer revealed driver was crashing so I did a clean driver install and retried. Same thing. Crashes.

I took out the card, installed it in another box and the same happened, crashes within a minute in Bioshock so I guessed card was going bad. I had a spare GTX650ti lying around so I swapped that in and it was all good.. at least I thought so. I was using that for about a month. (I live in Ecuador, I already have a GTX770 on the way but it takes some time to import)

The steam sale came forth and I bought some games so I had some extended gaming sessions. I was impressed about the 650ti... it was slower but no big deal it did work. The lockups came back... within an hour of bioshock infinite... I thought maybe it was just this once, fired Far Cry 3 and it crashed before the eternal initial sequence was over (just after the checkpoint).

I already tested with OCCT overnight and my overclock seems fine... Didn't have time for a 24h test. I also ran memtest+ overnight and the memory is alright. I ran OCCT CPU test on the video card for 2 hours with no issues but gaming still crashes my rig... it's weird..I was thinking it might be the PSU, after all I've tested all the components isolated but not all of them at once but I don't really know how to test if my PSU is going bad.

The last thing I added to the rig is the X25-M, it's a bit old and it was on another PC but it's fine and anyway nothing is stored there.

Help please, I already have that 770 on the way but I fear the crashing will continue...

Inspect the motherboard and check for any obvious damage or damaged capacitors, and check for any slight bulging. For checking the PSU you would need a accurate multimeter and test to see if the voltage drops when the system is under load and to see if the voltage is within specs. Also if you know some one that has an oscilloscope you can check the AC ripple current to see if its still within specs.

Inspect the motherboard and check for any obvious damage or damaged capacitors, and check for any slight bulging. For checking the PSU you would need a accurate multimeter and test to see if the voltage drops when the system is under load and to see if the voltage is within specs. Also if you know some one that has an oscilloscope you can check the AC ripple current to see if its still within specs.

Visual inspection revealed no issues.. multimeter could be doable I guess but I'd have to have some multimeter that logs voltages or something??.... or woud just checking at the time it locks up suffice? the rest is... overkill I think

Since you mentioned you tried the video card in another rig and it crashed again due to the drivers i would suggest you read upon TDRs.

For troubleshooting try rolling back to an older driver version. If you don't remember which one was stable then try 295.73 and test using the GTX 570.

Note that you are not alone, there are a lot of people that are experiencing this problem it's just that the reasons why the TDRs happen vary a lot.

nvidia did not recognize it as being their issue, maybe the reference design works fine and it could be a problem caused by their partners. Personally i'd advise anyone to steer away from nvidia products for a generation or two until they fix their problems but it could also be a bias on my part, maybe the percentage of cards that are defective is not that big, it just seems big because nvidia sold more of them than AMD.

nVidia video drivers FAIL, click for more infoDisclaimer: All answers and suggestions are provided by an enthusiastic amateur and are therefore without warranty either explicit or implicit. Basically you use my suggestions at your own risk.

Roll back to the drivers you find in your card brand site. I had a MSI 560ti which gave me problems with the latest nvidia drivers, although it worked fine with the drivers provided from MSI.

Also, do you have a overclocked CPU? I had mine OC to 4.3 and it passed all test I could imagine, there was this one game which crashed, World of Tanks. All other apps and games ran fine... So your overclock could not be stable...

It sounds similar to what I experienced when my X25-M failed, sporadic lockups and crashes. The SMART data was fine but when I ran the Full Disk Scan in Intel SSD Toolbox the PC crashed at around 70%. You should definitely run that scan on your SSDs if you haven't already.

As a note, I ran crysis 2 benches all night without a single crash at the highest settings. It's not the same since the benchmark closes and restarts crysis once every 3 runs. The only change I made is the case was open. I think it might be heat buildup since the last time it crashed the chipset heatsink was quite hot. I'll try to play with the lid on today to see if it makes any difference.

The 570 seems toast to me but I'll retry with older drivers if I have the time. The 650ti crashing worries me more since... well it's new and might mean something else is dying.

It sounds similar to what I experienced when my X25-M failed, sporadic lockups and crashes. The SMART data was fine but when I ran the Full Disk Scan in Intel SSD Toolbox the PC crashed at around 70%. You should definitely run that scan on your SSDs if you haven't already.

Since you mentioned you tried the video card in another rig and it crashed again due to the drivers i would suggest you read upon TDRs.

For troubleshooting try rolling back to an older driver version. If you don't remember which one was stable then try 295.73 and test using the GTX 570.

Note that you are not alone, there are a lot of people that are experiencing this problem it's just that the reasons why the TDRs happen vary a lot.

nvidia did not recognize it as being their issue, maybe the reference design works fine and it could be a problem caused by their partners. Personally i'd advise anyone to steer away from nvidia products for a generation or two until they fix their problems but it could also be a bias on my part, maybe the percentage of cards that are defective is not that big, it just seems big because nvidia sold more of them than AMD.

I think that did it... Increased the TDR timeout value and played for 2 hours non stop, let it idle ingame for 1 hour and then played another two hours and it never crashed. It was with the lid off so tomorrow I'll test again with the lid on, temps didn't seem any different but I think I might have a heat buildup issue too.

The 570 is toast though... it crashes within SECONDS even with the older drivers and it doesn't recover... actually I might have been misleading, it never recovered, I had these kind of crashes back then when one of my 8800GTXs was dying and you could "save it" by alt tabbing real quick when it seemed a crash was imminent... with the 570 it just black screens and locks up.

Aaaaaaaaand it crashed again but after a loooooong time. About 5 hours. There is some heat buildup in the chip set area. I should have got a blower type card for this case but I didn't. I'll have to work on the cooling before the 770 gets here.

As a general rule, when you are troubleshooting, only change ONE THING at a time. By changing a bunch of things at once, you're more likely to fix an issue or change the situation, but then you also have NO IDEA what actually had the desired effect.

I have two GTX 780s and I eventually started having issues with #2. The variable was the build of up dust on the fins of the cooler on #2. It seemed crazy to me, but it was the factor. I eventually decided I'd pull it apart after someone suggested the thermal pads might be off on it. That did turn out to be the case, and so I used MX-4 thermal compound and ended up doing it to #1 as well since my temps dropped almost 5C.

maybe the case that you have doesnt have enough airflow? that micro atx case seems to have enough slots for only 2 case fans. If you are using low speed low noise fans ~1000rpm, it would be better with a case that has 2 front, back and top fans for a total of 6. a large side fan never hurts either. Also in my experience, slight negative air pressure inside seems to improve cooling rather than positive pressure. im not sure if you can check the vram temps, but a lot of times when the video card crashes with normal gpu temps, the vram temps may be too high. And it seems like when the vram temps are too high it usually means the case air flow is too slow.

other times the video card blows hot air on the chipset and causes that to overheat. the remedy for that would be better airflow.

I believe someone else already suggested you check the PSU; but, I bet it's not up to handling the GPU load and/or is going bad. Sounds like the end result is a damaged card, since the card continues to have problems when you move it to another computers.